Crossroads Systems and Help/Systems Partner

Crossroads Systems, Inc. and Help/Systems, LLC, in operations automation software within the IBM i market, announced a technology partnership.

Through technological collaboration, Crossroads’ SPHiNX appliance now integrates transparently with Help/Systems’ Robot/SAVE solution, offering reliable, secure and cost-efficient backup and recovery solutions for IBM i. The partnership creates a significant new sales channel for Crossroads’ SPHiNX product and opens additional integration opportunities with Help/Systems’ Robot/SCHEDULE and Robot/REPORTS solutions.

About Crossroads SPHiNX
SPHiNX for Power Systems is a dedicated virtual tape appliance delivering optimized data protection and resiliency for IBM Power Systems (AS/400) environments. While dramatically decreasing the operational costs of maintaining a backup and recovery solution, SPHiNX enables storage administrators to gain performance and storage capacity from existing disk and tape backup infrastructures. Providing near immediate access to stored data, SPHiNX drastically reduces recovery time to meet increasingly stringent Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO). As a dedicated appliance, standard RAID arrays, hot swappable drives and power supplies are supported to ensure high availability of data.

About Help/Systems Solutions
Help/Systems offers a complete line of automated operations software products including Robot/SAVE, Robot/SCHEDULE, and Robot/REPORTS, that automate a wide range of functions for Power Systems running IBM i. Robot/SAVE is backup and recovery software that can restore a single object, or the entire system, in the event of a disaster. Its powerful automation features provide advanced tape management benefits for time and cost savings to storage administrators. Robot/SCHEDULE, job scheduling and batch job management software, automates common operator duties. Robot/REPORTS is report management software that saves time, security risks, and complexity by automating the operator duties of report bursting, distribution, bundling, and archiving.

Integrated together, SPHiNX, Robot/SAVE, Robot/SCHEDULE, and Robot/REPORTS operate seamlessly to deliver error-free automated media management of IBM i systems. Users also gain a suite of data security and management benefits, including complete object inventory of systems, audit trails, encryption, and optional use of tape. The solutions will be offered through Help/Systems to target both Crossroads customers and the Help/Systems customer base of more than 21,000 organizations.

"We are very excited at the opportunity to partner with Crossroads Systems," said Tom Huntington, Vice President of Technical Services at Help/Systems. "Crossroads has an excellent reputation for its superior solutions, innovation, and support. We look forward to delivering the best data protection solutions while reducing customer challenges through fully integrated automation. Our customers will see enormous value in the integration with SPHiNX as they continue to receive quality product support from both of us. This technology combination helps eliminate several backup and recovery headaches that many data center managers struggle with daily. Issues with tape mounts, replication, off-site storage, encryption, tape costs, and security are just a few of the items we can resolve with this solution set."

"Crossroads is extremely pleased to partner with the world’s largest independent provider of automated software solutions designed specifically for the IBM i market," said David Cerf, Executive Vice President of Business and Corporate Development at Crossroads Systems. "Our partnership enables us to rapidly penetrate a well-established market segment. We have successfully tested the integrated solutions and are now meeting with end customers interested in these cost-saving, end-to-end, backup and recovery solutions."